Conversational Intelligence ™

The Situational Leadership® II model has three core components – setting a SMART goal with your employee, diagnosing the development level of your employee with regard to the given goal, and applying the appropriate type of leadership for the person’s development level. Today, we’ll break down the two core factors that determine the development level…

A study done at Stanford University found that nine out of ten conversations miss their mark. In other words, 90% of the time, the thing that a person is trying to communicate to another person gets muddled in translation. And that “thing” could be a piece of information, a command, or an attitude. If you’re…

Trust in the workplace sometimes feels like it takes years to gain and seconds to lose. Changing workplace culture to facilitate trust is never an easy process, but it can be done, and it is certainly worth investing time and energy into. As we’ve outlined in previous posts, distrust is toxic in the workplace. It…

Distrust has seeped into our lives at a cultural level. For evidence, simply turn on the news. You’ll find story after story about government misconduct, new things we need to be afraid of, and people who are out to get us. There’s a general sense in every aspect of life from child rearing to dating…

In the dark ages of business, companies relied on fear as a motivator of performance. The intuition was that if employees felt that their jobs were constantly on the line, they would be frightened into doing their best possible work. As Dr. Edward Marshall points out in this great article, the reverse is actually true.…

Many of us underestimate the impact of workplace conversations on our mood, productivity, and general sense of well-being. If you love your job, you might think of workplace conversations as simply the cherry on the cake. If you hate your job, you might think of your workplace interactions as necessary evils that you have to…

When we interact with new people, we have biological responses within .07 seconds. We are naturally predisposed to be more trusting of some people than others. But as we interact more with the same people, those predispositions get washed away and we begin to have even stronger biological responses to the people that we like…

You know how some people say that they thrive under stress? Those people are lying. High levels of stress are no good for anyone. You might be someone who thrives in high pressure situations, but that’s not the same thing as enjoying high levels of stress. Too much stress causes a series of physical reactions,…

You should never judge a book by its cover. But we all do. And we do it in milliseconds. A recent study out of NYU showed test subjects pictures of faces for just 33 milliseconds. In that miniscule amount of time, different parts of the subject’s amygdala lit up, indicating that they either trusted the…

Think about the last conversation you had with your best friend. Now think about the last conversation you had with your mother, the last one you had with your child, or with a perfect stranger. How did the conversations affect you? Did you have the power in the conversation, or was it an even dialogue?…